Lott has a post (scroll to 1/10/04 entry on his blog) on the meaningless poll that discussed earlier. Lott’s headline is:

A BBC Poll Shows that Most British Want a Law authorizing homeowners to use any means to defend their home from intruders

Of course, as I explained earlier phone-in polls are not at all representative of the population. Nor in any case was there majority support for the shoot a burglar law, which received 37% of the votes.

Lott links to a post by Eric Rasmussen, who also seems to think that the poll is representative of public opinion in Britain. Sigh.

Of course, the two questions were slightly different: “any means” vs. “potentially deadly”, but I can’t think of “any means” that would be worse than “potentially deadly”, other than perhaps pouring boiling water and acid on someone.

In the US, the laws that delimit the legitimate exercise of self-defense usually use the phrase “use of deadly force”. This reflects the understanding that you have to be justified in using deadly force against someone attacking you or someone else. If you are justified in doing so, then the end result of the deadly force is not that important, from a legal perspective. The means of deadly force are also not that important – a baseball bat or an automobile could be used as a deadly weapons.